California has the most pro-worker and pro-union labor
relations law in the United States, and Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers
(UFW) were expected to use it to transform farm work from a job to a career.
Instead, unauthorized immigration increased the supply of workers, and farm
labor contractors organized them into crews that unions found hard to organize.
Instead of giving unions a second wind, legalization in 1986 accelerated the
vicious spiral of more workers, more labor contractors, and declining farm wages
and benefits, encouraging workers with other U.S. job options to find nonfarm
jobs. The revolving door that introduces rural Mexicans to the U.S. labor market
turned ever faster in the 1980s and 1990s, and the unionized share of the
workforce fell while the unauthorized share rose.

The Promise of La Causa

In March 1966, as Cesar
Chavez and a small band of marchers neared Sacramento for an Easter Sunday rally
in support of a contract for grape pickers, Schenley Industries, a conglomerate
that incidentally owned table grape farms in California’s Central Valley, agreed
to raise grape picker wages by 40 percent, from $1.25 to $1.75 an hour plus a
bonus, enabling most to earn twice the minimum wage. With its first contract in
hand, the organization that was to become the United Farm Workers union wrote to
other grape growers, asking for contracts or elections to allow workers to
decide if they wanted to be represented by unions. Grape growers did not
respond, and the UFW launched one of the most successful union-led boycotts in
U.S. history. "La Causa," the grape boycott to get growers to recognize the UFW,
prompted one in eight Americans to avoid grapes, led to a 24 percent drop in per
capita grape consumption, and eventually persuaded growers to recognize the UFW
and agree to substantial wage increases.

Cesar Chavez was hailed on the
cover of Time magazine July 4, 1969, as the Latino Martin Luther King, the
leader who was going to use a union to win wage increases and respect for
Hispanic workers. Less than a year later, in April 1970, the first of dozens of
grape growers signed contracts with the UFW that raised wages by 40 percent.
Collective bargaining promised to shift the locus of power in the seasonal farm
labor market from growers to the UFW, which planned to use union-run hiring
halls and organize workers into crews and send them to farms as needed. The UFW
also had an ambitious socio-political agenda, including educating and protecting
farmworkers by having them help to negotiate agreements with growers that
regulated mechanization and pesticides.

The 1970s were a heady time for
the UFW. Farm wages rose relative to manufacturing wages, from less than 50
percent of manufacturing wages in 1965 to almost 60 percent of manufacturing
wages in the late 1970s. UFW-called boycotts of lettuce and Gallo wines that
were eventually settled with contracts and higher wages convinced many growers
that their farmworkers would soon be represented by unions (See Figure 1).

Despite setbacks that included
growers signing sweetheart contracts with the Teamsters to avoid the UFW, Chavez
was able to organize many of the grape and vegetable workers in California,
prompting predictions that the UFW would soon be among the largest U.S. unions,
since most of the almost three million hired farmworkers in the United States
were assumed to be eager to join a union that could win substantial wage
increases. The UFW’s crowning moment came in June 1975, when Gov. Jerry Brown
signed into law the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA), which gave
California farmworkers the right to form or join unions and bargain collectively
with growers, the same right that most U.S. nonfarm private sector workers
achieved with the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Brown called the ALRA "The
greatest accomplishment of my administration."

The ALRA and UFW were expected
to usher in a new era for farm labor, at least in the factories in the fields
that hired hundreds of seasonal workers to harvest fruits and vegetables. There
were an average of five elections a day on California farms during the 1975
harvest, and the UFW won the right to represent farmworkers on 55 percent of the
400+ farms that had elections; the Teamsters won on another third of the farms
(See Figure 2).

The contracts negotiated by the
UFW and the Teamsters raised wages dramatically, often by 30 to 50 percent, and
provided farmworkers for the first time with fringe benefits such as health
insurance and pensions. In addition, unemployment insurance was extended to all
farmworkers under UFW pressure in 1978, giving seasonal workers some income in
the off season. Most Americans had favorable views of Cesar Chavez and the UFW,
seeing their efforts to uplift farmworkers as a long overdue erasure of "grapes
of wrath" and "harvest of shame" images of migrant and seasonal workers.
However, unauthorized migration was rising: apprehensions doubled between 1972
and 1977 to one million, and then rose another 30 percent by 1983.

Pyrrhic Victories

The UFW’s first vegetable
contracts expired in January 1979, when the lettuce harvest was in California’s
Imperial Valley, which borders Mexico in southeastern California. Acting like a
traditional union in its negotiations with a group of 26 growers, the UFW
demanded a 42 percent three-year wage increase for entry-level workers, plus
additional fringe benefits that, growers estimated, would have increased their
labor costs by over 100 percent. Growers instead offered to increase wages by
seven percent a year, as recommended under President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to
restrain inflation after oil prices rose with turmoil in Iran.

The UFW called a strike in
support of its demands, and posted "wet patrols" on the U.S.-Mexico border to
prevent unauthorized Mexicans from replacing strikers. The UFW was only
partially successful: Chavez complained that "employers go to Mexico and have
unlimited, unrestricted use of illegal alien strikebreakers to break the
strike."

1
However, in August 1979, some of the vegetable growers agreed to "record
contracts" that raised farmworker wages as the UFW had demanded and improved
benefits. The UFW charged that the growers that did not sign new contracts had
failed to bargain in good faith as required by the ALRA, and the state agency
administering the ALRA agreed, ordering them to pay the same wages and benefits
that the UFW had won with other growers under the law’s unique make-whole remedy
aimed at helping to level the playing field between growers and workers. For one
grower alone, make-whole wages and benefits were estimated to be $15 to $20
million, that is, the employer would have paid this much more to workers if he
had bargained lawfully.

Cesar Chavez and the UFW became
major players in California agriculture and politics in the early 1980s. The UFW,
with 40,000 to 50,000 mostly Mexican-American and Mexican immigrant members, had
a political action committee whose expenditures for statewide candidates were
second only to the doctors’ PAC in 1982. But the writing was on the wall for a
major loss of UFW power. Several long-time supporters left the UFW and accused
Chavez of losing touch with newly-arrived farmworkers, many of whom did not
appreciate what Chavez and the UFW had done. Mexico’s peso was devalued in
1982-83, and the number of Mexicans apprehended by the Border Patrol rose 30
percent. Republican governors replaced the staff of the agency administering the
ALRA, and the courts overturned many of the agency’s orders requiring growers to
pay make-whole wages. Finally, many of the conglomerates most vulnerable to UFW
boycotts that bought farmland during the inflationary 1970s quit farming, and
were replaced by farmers determined to keep labor costs low.

The UFW went on the defensive,
trying to retain contracts in a changed labor and political environment. UFW-called
strikes in the early 1980s were frequently broken by farm labor contractors (FLCs)
who hired recently arrived and often unauthorized workers, and FLCs gained
market share as more farmers decided to use them to obtain workers rather than
to hire workers directly. FLCs were often more than just employers and, by
offering housing, rides to work, and sometimes loans to the workers they hired
to repay smugglers, they ensured that there were no pro-union workers in the
crews they brought to farms. Statewide data highlight the declining share of
workers hired directly by farmers, and the rising share of workers brought to
farms by FLCs and other farm services employers (See Figure 3).

Citrus harvesting in Ventura
County, north of Los Angeles illustrates the labor market dynamics that
eventually undermined the UFW. Cooperatives are common in agriculture to lower
the cost of buying inputs like fertilizers, and to market commodities; Sunkist,
for example, is a co-op of 5,000 citrus growers. In Ventura County, there were
also labor co-ops to recruit and deploy seasonal citrus harvesting crews, which
primarily consisted of Braceros housed in camps of 1,000 or more between 1942
and 1964. The mid-1960s were a "time of transition" in Ventura county, as
growers adapted to a non-Bracero workforce by reducing quality standards,
introducing a piece-rate wage system that aimed to standardize worker earnings
despite the varying weight, yield, and size of the lemons picked, and increasing
worker productivity with new clippers, lighter synthetic picking bags, and
aluminum ladders.

The largest of the labor co-ops
was the Coastal Growers Association, founded in 1961.

2
After the Bracero program ended, CGA developed modern personnel practices to
recruit, reward, and encourage the best pickers to return year after year, and
the result was a win-win situation. CGA pickers saw their average piece rate
earnings rise from $1.77 an hour in 1965 to $5.63 an hour in 1978, and their
average annual earnings rose from $267 for 151 hours of work in 1965 to $3,430
in 1978 for 609 hours.3
The number of pickers employed at CGA fell from 8,517 in 1965 to 1,292 in 1978,
and average worker productivity rose from 3.4 boxes an hour in 1965, to 8.4
boxes an hour in 1978. Direct picking costs for growers rose slower than the
rate of inflation, from $0.53 to $0.66 a box, as CGA hired fewer but more
productive harvesters.4

CGA workers voted 897-42 to have
the UFW represent them in March 1978, and a three-year agreement raised piece
rate wages a further 22 percent. Growers had little choice but to turn to the
unionized co-ops for workers, since the UFW represented about 70 percent of
Ventura citrus harvesters.

5
However growers could withdraw from the labor co-ops and hire workers via FLCs
and, as rising wages and benefits pushed up picking costs, some did. The co-ops
told the UFW to organize the FLC workers or moderate its wage demands, but
instead the UFW called a strike against the co-ops in 1982 in support of a
demand for higher wages. More growers left the co-ops, and most soon disbanded.
Ventura citrus harvesting was mostly unionized for only about five years.

Did the UFW overreach in Ventura
County, or did illegal immigration undermine its demands for higher wages?
During the heyday of the unionized labor co-ops, the typical Ventura county
citrus harvester was a Mexican-American or legal Mexican immigrant who spent six
to eight months in the United States doing farm work and four to six months in
Mexico. Mexican-Americans and green-card commuters began to age out of
harvesting jobs in the late 1970s, and some became FLCs who knew that recently
arrived young men did not care much about the benefits in UFW contracts that
were pushing up the co-ops’ labor costs. The FLCs could offer the same
piece-rate wages to pickers as the co-ops, but pick lemons and oranges cheaper
because of their lower overhead costs, which fell as FLCs began to compete with
one another.

The UFW and the co-ops were
replaced by FLCs employing mostly unauthorized and non-union workers. This
replacement process was not one in which there were separate queues for
Mexican-Americans, legal immigrants, and unauthorized workers seeking jobs.
Instead, U.S. workers were displaced in a competition between the unionized
co-ops and FLCs that the co-ops lost. As a result, the harvest workforce went
from mostly Mexican-Americans and legal immigrants to mostly unauthorized
workers.

Immigration Reform and its Aftermath

The UFW was well aware that
rising illegal immigration was a threat, and in 1981 testified in favor of
employer sanctions and ample funds to enforce them.6
When Congress began to debate immigration reforms in the early 1980s, there was
relatively little testimony on agriculture, where 15 to 20 percent of
unauthorized workers were believed to be employed. The UFW was engaged in a new
grape boycott, the "wrath of grapes" direct-mail campaign, that urged consumers
not to buy grapes because they contained traces of "dangerous pesticides," while
California growers were more concerned about lingering union battles than the
debate in Washington over employer sanctions.

As Congress got more serious
about immigration reform, California farmers reacted, forming the Farm Labor
Alliance to demand a separate guestworker program for western agriculture. Most
growers did not have the on-farm housing required to participate in the H-2
guestworker program used by eastern growers to employ Jamaican sugar cane and
apple harvesters. Furthermore, California farmers feared that, if they tried to
recruit U.S. workers as required before H-2 workers could arrive, they might be
forced to hire pro-UFW workers. The FLA won, in what the New York Times called
one of the top 10 political stories of 1984, the so-called Panetta-Morrison
guestworker program that did not require employers to provide on-farm housing,
and did not require government-supervised recruitment of U.S. workers before
hiring guestworkers. In 1985, then-Senator (later California Governor) Pete
Wilson (R-Calif.) persuaded the Senate to approve a similar guestworker program,
prompting Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) to decry these programs as efforts to
merely "legalize the status quo of illegal labor in agriculture."

Then-Representative (now
Senator) Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) brokered the three-part farm labor compromise
in the summer of 1986 that allowed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of
1986 to become law. First, the H-2 program was made more employer-friendly and
revised into the H-2A program. Second, the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW)
legalization program gave legal status to unauthorized workers who did at least
90 days of work on crop farms in 1985-86.

8
Third, if SAWs quickly left agriculture and there were farm labor shortages,
Replenishment Agricultural Workers (RAWs) could be admitted and, if they did
sufficient farm work, they could earn a legal immigrant status.9

The battle for farmworker
loyalty turned from the fields to immigration offices, as the UFW and farmers
established competing Qualified Designated Entities to help unauthorized
farmworkers become legal immigrants. The farmers’ QDE was one of the largest,
helping over 50,000 foreigners gain legal status, but most of the 1.3 million
SAW applicants applied with the help of private attorneys and consultants. The
UFW nonetheless hoped that the now-legal workers would feel confident to demand
higher wages and the restoration of benefits that were dropped in the 1980s.
However, illegal immigration surged, as Mexicans moved to the United States
hoping for legal status. The result, according to the federal Commission on
Agricultural Workers, was "a general oversupply of farm labor
nationwide...[which has] generally interfered with workers’ ability to organize.
With fraudulent documents easily available, employer sanctions have been largely
ineffective."

SAWs who were legitimate
farmworkers found themselves in a position similar to Mexican Americans in the
1950s, during the height of the Bracero program. If they stayed in the fields,
they faced wages that were depressed by the continued arrival of newcomers. Many
left for the nonfarm labor market, where there was less wage-depressing
competition from new arrivals — the percentage of SAWs among crop workers
dropped in the 1990s as the percentage of unauthorized workers rose. Newspapers
in the early 1990s documented poor conditions for farmworkers in series entitled
"Fields of Pain" and the "New Harvest of Shame"

The UFW had no table grape
contracts when Cesar Chavez died on April 23, 1993, but he soon became an icon.
President Clinton awarded Chavez a posthumous Medal of Freedom in 1994 and said
"We can be proud of his enormous accomplishments and in the dignity and comfort
he brought to the lives of so many of our country’s least powerful and most
dispossessed workers." Chavez was inducted into the AFL-CIO’s Labor Hall of Fame
and several states, including California, made Chavez’s March 31st
birthday a holiday. Thousands of parks, streets, and schools across the United
States were renamed in honor of Chavez.

Chavez was replaced as UFW
president by his son-in-law, who announced that the UFW would repeat its
historic Delano-to-Sacramento march and once again organize farmworkers. The UFW
tested its new organizing strategy in the California strawberry industry, aiming
to organize the 20,000 to 25,000 pickers employed for six months or more picking
berries worth about $600 million to farmers, and costing consumers about $3
billion. Most strawberry pickers earned about five cents for picking a pint of
berries, and the UFW launched a "five cents for fairness" campaign, promising
workers it would seek to double their wages, and assuring the public that the
cost of strawberries would rise only a nickel in the supermarket.12

The UFW targeted the largest
employer of strawberry pickers, a subsidiary of Monsanto. With encouragement
from leading Democratic politicians, Monsanto sold its strawberry farms to
pro-union investors, who renamed them Coastal Berry. Even though AFL-CIO
president John Sweeney called the UFW’s strawberry campaign the most important
union organizing drive in the United States in April 1997, a pioneering effort
to organize low-wage Hispanic workers,13
it took three elections and several years before the UFW won the right to
represent 1,500 Coastal Berry workers. Today, the strawberry industry remains
largely non-union, with fewer than 10 percent of pickers represented by unions.

Over the past two decades, the
UFW changed its position on immigration, and became a leading voice inside the
AFL-CIO in favor of ending employer sanctions and legalizing unauthorized
foreigners. Labor organizer Bert Corona, who supported Chavez and the UFW during
the 1970s and 1980s said: "I did have an important difference with Cesar. This
involved his, and the union’s position, on the need to apprehend and deport
undocumented Mexican immigrants who were being used as scabs by the growers...
[I] believed that organizing undocumented farmworkers was auxiliary to the
union’s efforts to organize the fields. We supported an open immigration policy,
as far as Mexico was concerned."14
The UFW adopted Corona’s position and in 2000, when the AFL-CIO’s Executive
Council called for an end to employer sanctions enforcement and for the
legalization of unauthorized foreigners, UFW President Arturo Rodriguez said
"This is a way to help low-wage immigrant workers."15

Promise Unfulfilled

More than a quarter
century after the enactment of the most pro-worker and pro-union labor relations
law in the United States, there are fewer workers under union contract in
California agriculture than before the ALRA was enacted, and farm wages and
working conditions have slipped further behind the U.S. norms than they were in
the 1960s and 1970s. There are four major reasons advanced for the failure of
the ALRA and the UFW to transform the farm labor market: poor union leadership,
state-level political changes, farm labor market changes, and rising illegal
immigration.

The union leadership explanation
acknowledges that Chavez was a charismatic leader who could articulate the hopes
of farmworkers, but charges that Chavez and the UFW were unable to administer
the contracts they negotiated, and that the UFW lost its credibility with
workers when it stopped organizing newly-arrived migrants who had not heard of
the UFW and assumed that a union simply meant another deduction from their
paychecks, as it had at home. There were many problems with UFW contracts, as
when UFW-run hiring halls could not deploy seasonal workers efficiently in a
pre-computer era, and union-run health and pension plans sometimes failed to pay
doctors and workers in a timely fashion, prompting dissatisfaction with the UFW
among members.

The political change explanation
is that the ALRA was enacted and administered under pro-worker Democratic
appointees between 1975 and 1982, then pro-grower Republicans between 1983 and
1998, Democrats between 1998 and 2003, and now a Republican governor again. This
argument makes the success of unions in representing and winning benefits for
farmworkers dependent on who is making appointments to the ALRB.

The other two explanations for
the failure of the ALRA and unions to transform the farm labor market are
empirical. Unions were most successful dealing with the farming subsidiaries of
nonfarm conglomerates, such as Shell Oil, Seven-Up, and Tenneco. After these
conglomerates sold their farming operations in the 1980s, the threat of union
boycotts diminished, and the growers who took over the land turned to labor
contractors for workers. It proved very hard for unions to organize FLC workers,
since FLCs know that if they develop a reputation for bringing pro-union crews
to farms, farmers will select a different contractor.

The final explanation for the
failure of the ALRA to transform the farm labor market is increased legal and
illegal immigration. Two numbers tell the story. In 1987-88, when there were
about six million adult men in rural Mexico, the United States legalized one
million Mexican men under the SAW program. The fact that many of these men did
not do the qualifying farm work but nonetheless became immigrants taught rural
Mexicans that being an unauthorized worker in the United States can bring
immigration benefits. This encouraged more rural Mexicans to migrate to the
United States, as indicated by the rising number of apprehensions: 1.6 million
during the 1960s, 8.3 million during the 1970s, 12 million during the 1980s, and
14 million during the 1990s. Rising illegal immigration facilitated the switch
to FLCs, and made it hard for the UFW to negotiate contracts that raised wages.

The golden age for American
farmworkers was between the late 1960s, after the Bracero program ended, and the
early 1980s, before peso devaluations sent Mexicans streaming north. The ALRA
was enacted in the middle of that golden age, and predictions made in 1975 did
not anticipate the farm employer and immigration changes of the 1980s and 1990s.
Until unauthorized immigration is reduced, farmworker unions will find it
difficult to organize and negotiate higher wages for farmworkers, and the ALRA
and unions will remain a promise unfulfilled in transforming the farm labor
market.

The CGA is examined in Lloyd, Jack, Philip L. Martin and John Mamer. 1988.
The Ventura citrus labor market. Berkeley: University of California,
Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Giannini Foundation: Giannini
information series 88-1.

3

Mines and Anzaldua reported that a UFW-represented crew at CGA averaged $6.35 an
hour in 1981, and a UFW-represented Limoneria crew averaged $6.50 an hour; the
federal minimum wage in 1981 was $3.35 an hour. The CGA workers averaged $4,034
for 4.8 months, and the Limoneria crew $8,419 for 8.2 months in 1981 (p100).
Mines, Richard and Ricardo Anzaldua. 1982. New Migrants vs Old Migrants.
Alternative Labor Market Structures in the California Citrus Industry. UC
San Diego. Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies.

4

The total cost per box (18 bags or boxes = 1 bin) rose 73 percent, from $0.63 in
1965 to $1.09 in 1978, with the introduction of benefits that ranged from paid
vacation to health insurance. The employment count is the number of W-2
statements issued.

5

In 1980, Ventura County had 25,000 acres of lemons and 17,000 acres of oranges,
as well as 17 citrus packing houses.

6

Stephanie Bower, UFW Legislative Director, testifying September 30, 1981 said:
"We therefore concur with the AFL-CIO’s position that imposing sanctions on
employers who hire illegal aliens would be a good vehicle for controlling the
hiring of illegal aliens if the proposed legislation could be effectively
enforced." Bower recommended a fine of $1,500 per worker per day, and added "we
strongly urge that a large budget for staff and operations be allocated toward
the enforcement" of sanctions. (p78). The Knowing Employment of Illegal
Immigrants, Hearing before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and
Refugee Policy, Serial J-97-61, September 30, 1981.

7

Congressional Record, September 12, 1985, p. S11326.

8

The SAW program had very easy legalization requirements because it was assumed
that many unauthorized workers were employed by FLCs who did not keep records.
After an individual asserted that he did at least 90 days of qualifying farm
work, the burden of proof shifted to the INS to disprove the worker’s claim. The
INS was not prepared for the volume of applications–1.3 million instead of the
400,000 expected–or the significant fraud–at least half of the applicants did
not do the qualifying farm work they claimed. Martin, Philip L. 1994. Good
intentions gone awry: IRCA and U.S. agriculture. The Annals of the Academy
Of Political and Social Science, Vol 534: 44-57. July.

9

After doing at least 90 days of farm work a year for three years, the RAW could
become a legal immigrant. There were no farm labor shortages, and the 1989-93
RAW program was allowed to expire without being used.

10

Commission on Agricultural Workers Final Report. 1992, p. xxii.

11

Sacramento Bee, December 8-11, 1991; Boston Globe, April 26, 1990.

12

Fresh strawberries are picked directly into the plastic containers in which they
are sold; most are picked in a 12-pint tray for piece rates of about $1.50 per
tray, or $0.125 per pint. Farmers receive an average $0.40 to $0.50 a pint;
pints of strawberries retail for an average $1.50 to $2 a pint.

Quoted in Steven Greenhouse, "Labor Urges Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants,"
New York Times, February 17, 2000. For more on the AFL-CIO change in
position, see Vernon Briggs. 2003. Testimony before the Subcommittee on
Immigration, Border Security, and International Claims of the House Judiciary
Committee. October 30.
www.house.govjudiciarybriggs103003.pdf